Paul hastily signaled the bar. “We were just having a small debate on aesthetics.”
Helene Vauxcelles-Serusier removed her spex, folded them, made them vanish into a slit in the cape. Maya stared in astonishment. Helene’s natural eyes, slate gray, astoundingly beautiful, tremendously remote, were far more intimidating than any computer-assisted perception set. “What charming preoccupations you have, Paul.”
“Helene, do you think a mechanically assisted sunset can be more beautiful than a natural sunset?”
“Darling, there hasn’t been a natural sunset since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.” Helene glanced briefly at Maya, then pinned her with the focused shaft of her attention like a moth in a cigar box. “Please don’t stand there, my child. Do have a seat with us. Have we met?”
“Ciao Helene. I’m Maya.”
“Oh, yes! Vietti’s girl, on the net. I knew that I’d seen you. But you’re lovely.”
“Thank you very much.” Maya sat. Helene studied her with grave interest and deep benevolence. It felt exactly like being x-rayed.
“You’re charming, my dear. You don’t seem one bit as sinister as you do in that terrible old man’s photographs.”
“The terrible old man is standing right over there at the bar, Helene.”
“Oh dear,” said Helene, deeply unmoved. “I’ll never learn tact, will I? Really, that was so bad of me. I must go see your friend Josef and apologize from the bottom of my heart.” She rose and left for the bar.
“Good heavens, Paul,” Maya said slowly, watching Helene glide away. “I’ve never, ever seen such a—”
Paul made the slightest possible throat-cutting gesture and gazed at his feet. Maya shut up and looked down. One of Helene’s tiny white dogs looked up at her with the chilly big-science intensity of an interplanetary probe.
Bouboule appeared. Sober and anxious. “Ciao Maya.”
“Ciao Bouboule.”
“Some of the girls are going for the breath of air. Will you come with us? For a moment?”
“Certainly, darling.” Maya gave Paul a silent look full of meaning, and Paul looked back, with a gaze of such masculine trench-warfare gallantry that she wanted to tie a silken banner to him.
She followed Bouboule through an unmarked door at the back of the bar, then up four flights of steep, switchback, iron-railed stairs. Bouboule had her marmoset with her. Maya had never felt so glad to see a monkey.
Bouboule led her through the junk-cluttered attic, and then up a black iron ladder. Bouboule threw back a heavy wooden trapdoor and they emerged on the slope of the ancient tiled roof of the Tête du Noyé. Now that it was spring, Praha’s winter overcast had finally been chased away. The night was full of young stars.
Bouboule closed the trapdoor with a clunk and spoke for the first time. “Now I think it’s safe to talk.”
“Why is that cop here?”
“Sometimes she comes, sometimes she doesn’t,” Bouboule said dourly. “There’s nothing we can do.”
It was a sharp night. Cold and still. The marmoset chattered in distress. “[Be good, my Patapouff,]” Bouboule chided in Français. “[Tonight you must guard me.]” The marmoset seemed to understand this. He adjusted his tiny top hat and looked about as fierce as a yellow two-kilo primate could manage.
Maya scrambled with Bouboule to the peak of the roof, where they sat without a trace of comfort on the narrow ridgeline of arched greenish tiles.
The trapdoor opened again. Benedetta and Niko emerged.
“Is she onto us tonight?” Benedetta said anxiously.
Bouboule shrugged, and sniffed. “[I didn’t tell. You and your little politicals, you are so secret with me that I couldn’t tell if I wanted.]”
“Ciao Niko,” Maya said. She reached down and helped Niko to the peak of the roof.
“We didn’t meet in flesh before,” said Niko, “but what you say on the net, it’s very funny.”
“You’re very sweet to say that.”
“I heal from that black eye your little friend Klaudia gave me, so I decide, I like you anyway.”
“That’s very good of you, Niko, dear. Considering.”
“It’s so cold,” complained Bouboule, hugging her arms. “It’s so stupid that the Widow can drive us to this. For two marks I’d run down there and slap her face.”
“Why do they call her the Widow?” Maya said. The four of them were now squatting like four vivid magpies on the peak of the roof. The question seemed ideal for the circumstances.
“Well,” said Bouboule, “most women get over sex in later life. But not the Widow. She keeps marrying.”
“She always marries men of a certain type,” said Benedetta. “Artists. Very self-destructive artists.”
“She marries the dead-at-forty,” said Niko. “Every time.”
“She tries to save the poor gifted boys from themselves,” said Benedetta.
“Had any luck?” Maya asked.
“So far, six dead ones,” Bouboule said.
“That’s got to hurt,” Maya said.
“I grant her this much,” said Benedetta. “She never marries them until they are really far gone. And I think she does keep them alive and working a little extra while.”
“Any boy in her bed is too afraid to die,” Niko said sweetly.
Bouboule nodded. “When she sells their work later, she always holds out for top mark! She makes their reputation in the art world! Such a lovely trick! Don’t you know.”
“I see,” said Maya. “It’s a coup de grâce, then. It’s a charity.”
Benedetta sneezed, then waved her hand. “You must be wondering why I called you here tonight.”
“Do tell us,” urged Maya, cupping her chin.
“Darling, we want to make you one of us tonight.”
“Really?”
“But we have a little test for you first.”
“A little test. But of course.”
Benedetta pointed down the length of the roof. The roofline stretched for the length of the bar. At the roof’s far edge rose the broad metal post of a shallow celestial bowl. Klaus’s satellite antenna. Maybe twenty meters away.
“Yes?” Maya said.
Benedetta plucked the stylus from her hair. She adjusted a tiny knob, then bent over carefully and touched the stylus to a ceramic tile. Sparks flew. Blackness etched its way into the tile.
“Sign our membership list,” Benedetta said. She handed Maya the stylus.
“Wonderful. Good idea. Where do I sign?”
“You sign on that post.” Benedetta pointed at the satellite dish.
“You walk,” Niko said.
“You mean I walk from here to there, along the peak of this roof.”
“She’s so clever,” said Bouboule to Niko. Niko nodded smugly.
“So I just walk twenty meters in the dark along the peak of a slippery tile roof with a four-story drop on both sides,” Maya said. “That’s what you want from me. Right?”
“Do you remember,” said Benedetta, quietly, “that vivid friend of yours in Roma? Little Natalie?”
“Natalie. Sure. What about her?”
“You asked me to look after your friend Natalie a little.”
“Yes, I did.”
“I did that for you,” Benedetta said. “Now I know your Natalie. She could never pass this test. You know why? Because she’ll stop in the middle, and she’ll know that she can’t win. Then the fear will kill her. The blackness and the badness will take her by her little beating heart, and she’ll slip. Down she goes. Off the edge, darling. Bang, bang, bang, down the tiles. And then hard onto the cold old streets of Praha. If she’s lucky, she’ll land on her head.”
“But since you are one of us,” Bouboule said, “it’s not risky.”
“It only looks risky,” offered Niko brightly.